A goodfaith interpretation of this reads to me as: you are sad about feeling “shamed” or socially punished for what happened and angry because you feel like you shouldn’t be punished for something that you couldn’t have done differently—and you want other people to acknowledge that this sucks for you. This is all understandable. It might in fact not be your fault (impossible for me to know), and I’m sorry if that’s the case. But this will not be the last time you will be affected by something that isn’t your fault. It’s okay to be sad/angry at this, but I honestly think whatever acknowledgement you get from other people about this particular case will not eliminate this sad thing about your (or anyone else’s) life.
But there is another interpretation, that feels a lot like “I’m hurt and leaving this community. It’s not my fault. So it has to be someone elses”(“the community, frances, the time magazine article, whoever acts like you don’t care about women’s suffering.”).
If you don’t endorse that second one, I think this post, and particularly the first sentence is not very helpful.
(“When people talk about women’s negative experiences in EA, they act as if it happens because men just don’t care about women’s feelings.” )
Clearly noone knows about what other people care about. And to assume that every man who hurts women doesn’t care about women’s feelings would be overconfident. What seems reasonable though is that 1) men who hurt women either don’t care enough to change their behaviour or 2) cannot change their behaviour.
Without getting into a conversation about how easy it is to change your behaviour in particular or free will or whatever—it seems fair to say that hurting people is wrong and that it would be good to incentivise not hurting others—so that its worth caring about whether or not you’re hurting other people.
This is intrinsically going to be shitty for people who—for some reason—cannot change their behaviour. But the alternative of simply tolerating people hurting others seems .. just pretty clearly worse? Partially because you’ll still face the problem of being associated with people who absolutely could change their behaviour, but just don’t—because they don’t care enough about other people’s feelings. You might not be excluded from EAG’s, but EAG’s would look pretty different, too.
You do say “It’s ok if the community decides to value the comfort of some subset of women over guys like me. But I wish we acknowledged this trade-off.”—I’m assuming you mean “guys who can’t change their behaviour—even when they care enough to try” - How can a community “acknowledge” that your inability to change your behaviour—infact—wasn’t anyone’s fault and you couldn’t have done any better and that you tried your best—when this is clearly impossible for anyone (but you) to know? Furthermore—how do you know that you genuinely can’t change your behaviour? Changing this stuff can take a long long time, and a lot of reflection on the culture you grew up in, getting better at asking for things, confronting painful stuff, etc.
The pragmatic approach for a community to this stuff just is “We don’t know whether this behaviour is anyone’s fault, but the consequences of this behaviour seem unacceptable (i.e. constantly getting harassed at EAGs seems so much worse than not being able to attend EAG’s for a year) so we should incentivise people trying as hard as they can to not do it.” Particularly when “Some men just can’t help it, so what happens happens” has historically been used as an argument for terrible terrible norms in this particular area.
Loved this piece. People should take into account non-AI context far far more than they do to drive their conclusion on AI governance/safety.